appear noblest when showing himself faithful in his own hall to the "huts where poor men lie;" while we know not, at the close, which life the poet has most glorifiedthe humble or the high-whether the Lord did the shepherd more ennoble, or the shepherd the Lord.

Now, we ask, is there any essential difference between what Wordsworth thus records of the high-born shepherdLord and what he records of the low-born youth in the. Excursion? None. They are both educated among the hills; and according to the nature of their own souls and that of their education, is the progressive growth and ultimate formation of their character. Both are exalted beings-because both are wise and good—but to his own coeval he has given, besides eloquence and genius,

That,

"The vision and the faculty divine,"

"When years had brought the philosophic mind,"

he might walk through the dominions of the intellect and the imagination, a sage and a teacher.

But as yet he is in his eighteenth year, and

"Is summoned to select the course
Of humble industry that promised best
To yield him no unworthy maintenance."

For a season he taught a village school, which many a fine, high, and noble spirit has done and is doing; but he was impatient of the hills he loved, and

"That stern yet kindly spirit, who constrains
The Savoyard to quit his native rocks,

The freeborn Swiss to leave his narrow vales
(Spirit attached to regions mountainous

Like their own steadfast clouds), did now impel
His restless mind to look abroad with hope."

It had become his duty to choose a profession—a trade -a calling. He was not a gentleman, mind ye, and had probably never so much as heard a rumour of the exis

tence of a silver fork: he had been born with a wooden spoon in his mouth,-and lived, partly from choice, and partly from necessity, on a vegetable diet. He had not ten pounds in the world he could call his own; but he could borrow fifty, for his father's son was to be trusted to that amount by any family that chanced to have it among the Athol hills-therefore he resolved on "a hard service," which

"Gained merited respect in simpler times;

When squire, and priest, and they who round them dwelt
In rustic sequestration, all dependent

Upon the PEDLAR's toil, supplied their wants,

Or pleased their fancies with the ware he brought."

Could Alfred have ceased to be Alfred had he lived twenty years in the hut where he spoiled the bannocks? Would Gustavus have ceased to be Gustavus had he been doomed to dree an ignoble life in the obscurest nook in Dalecarlia? Were princes and peers in our day degraded by working, in their expatriation, with head or hand for bread? Are the Polish patriots degraded by working at eighteen-pence a day, without victuals, on embankments of railroads? "At the risk of giving a shock to the prejudices of artificial society, I have ever been ready to pay homage to the aristocracy of nature, under a conviction that vigorous human-heartedness is the constituent principle of true taste." These are Wordsworth's own words, and deserve letters of gold. He has given many a shock to the prejudices of artificial society; and in ten thousand cases, where the heart of such society was happily sound at the core, notwithstanding the rotten kitchen-stuff with which it was encrusted, the shocks have killed the prejudices; and men and women, encouraged to consult their own breasts, have heard responses there to the truths uttered in music by the high-souled bard, assuring them of an existence there of capacities of pure delight, of which they had either but a faint suspicion, or, because "of the world's dread laugh," feared to indulge, and nearly let die.

Mr. Wordsworth quotes from Heron's Scotland an interesting passage illustrative of the life led in our country

at that time by that class of persons from whom he has chosen one-not, mind you, imaginary, though for purposes of imagination—adding that "his own personal knowledge emboldened him to draw the portrait." In that passage Heron says, “As they wander, each alone, through thinly inhabited districts, they form habits of reflection, and of sublime contemplation," and that with all their qualifications, no wonder they should contribute much to polish the roughness and soften the rusticity of our peasantry. "In North America," says he, "travelling merchants from the settlements have done and continue to do much more towards civilizing the Indian natives than all the missionaries, Papist or Protestant, who have ever been sent among them;" and, speaking again of Scotland, he says, “it is not more than twenty or thirty years, since a young man going from any part of Scotland to England for the purpose to carry the pack, was considered as going to lead the life, and acquire the fortune, of a gentleman. When, after twenty years' absence, in that honourable line of employment, he returned with his acquisitions to his native country, he was regarded as a gentleman to all intents and purposes." We have ourselves known gentlemen who had carried the pack-one of them a man of great talents and acquirements who lived in his old age in the highest circles of society. Nobody troubled their head about his birth and parentage for he was then very rich-but you could not sit ten minutes in his company without feeling that he was "one of God Almighty's gentlemen," belonging to the "aristocracy of Nature."

Look then on the PEDLAR-and be grateful to Words. worth

"From his native hills

He wandered far; much did he see of men,
Their manners, their enjoyments, and pursuits,
Their passions and their feelings; chiefly those
Essential and eternal in the heart,

That, 'mid the simpler forms of rural life,
Exist more simple in their elements,
And speak a plainer language. In the woods
A lone enthusiast, and among the fields,
Itinerant in his labour, he had passed

The better portion of his time; and there
Spontaneously had his affections thriven
Amid the beauties of the year, the peace
And liberty of nature; there he kept
In solitude and solitary thought
His mind in a just equipoise of love.
Serene it was, unclouded with the cares
Of ordinary life; unvexed, unwarped
By painful bondage. In his steady course,
No piteous revolutions had he felt,
No wild varieties of joy and grief
Unoccupied by sorrow of its own,

His heart lay open; and, by nature tuned
And constant disposition of his thoughts
To sympathy with man, he was alive
To all that was enjoyed where'er he went,
And all that was endured; for in himself
Happy, and quiet in his cheerfulness,
He had no painful pressure from without,
That made him turn aside from wretchedness,
With coward fears. He could afford to suffer
With those whom he saw suffer. Hence it came
That in our best experience he was rich,
And in the wisdom of our daily life.

For hence, minutely, in his coming rounds,
He had observed the progress and decay
Of many minds, of minds and bodies too;

The history of many families;

How they had prospered; how they were o'erthrown,
By passion or mischance; or such misrule

Among the unthinking masters of the earth

As makes the nations groan."

What was to hinder such a man-thus born and thus bred-with such a youth and such a prime-from being in his old age worthy of walking among the mountains with Wordsworth, and descanting

"On man, on nature, and on human life?"

And remember he was a Scotsman-a compatriot of CHRISTOPHER North.

What would you rather have had the sage in the Excursion to have been? The senior fellow of a college? An ex-lord-chancellor? A

A head?

A retired judge?

nabob? A banker? A millionaire? or, at once, to condescend on individuals, Natus Consumere Fruges, Esq.? or the Honourable Custos Rotulorum?

Look into life and watch the growth of the soul. Men are not what they seem to the outward eye-mere machines moving about in customary occupations-productive labourers of food and wearing apparel-slaves from morn to night at task-work set them by the wealth of nations. They are the children of God. The soul never sleeps-not even when its wearied body is heard snoring by people living in the next street. All the souls now in this world are for ever awake; and this life, believe us, though in moral sadness it has often been rightly called so, is no dream. In a dream we have no will of our own, no power over ourselves; ourselves are not felt to be ourselves; our familiar friends seem strangers from some far off country; the dead are alive, yet we wonder not; the laws of the physical world are suspended, or changed, or confused by our phantasy; intellect, imagination, the moral sense, affection, passion, are not possessed by us in the same way we possess them out of that mystery: were life a dream, or like a dream, it would never lead to heaven.

Again, then, we say to you, look into life and watch the growth of the soul. In a world where the ear cannot listen without hearing the clank of chains, the soul may yet be free as if it already inhabited the skies. For its Maker gave it LIBERTY OF CHOICE OF GOOD OR OF EVILand if it has chosen the good it is a king. All its faculties are then fed on their appropriate food provided for them in nature. The soul then knows where the necessaries and the luxuries of its life grow, and how they may be gathered-in a still sunny region inaccessible to blight-"no mildewed ear blasting his wholesome brother."

"And thou shalt summer high in bliss upon the hills of God." Go read the EXCURSION then-venerate the PEDLAR-pity the SOLITARY-respect the PRIEST, and love the POET.

So charmed have we been with the sound of our own